Thursday, April 28, 2011

Nathan Bitner and the Mysterious Tunnel

I ever tell you the story of the Nathan Bitner Expose?  Its a memorable story to me because I myself entered the He-Man character contest back in the 80's.  My character was Hear-O (he had excellent vision...or someting) and I was convinced I was going to win with an idea like that.  Then Bitner came along with his superior drawing skills and his character Photog won the contest.  Years later X-Entertainment writes a little blog about whatever happened to Nathan Bitner and the sordid exploits of his youth and otherwise become public knowledge.  Memorable.

Today I happened upon a little pic on Shorpy,com of a mysterious tunnel from 1924.  Reading through the comments (often almost as fun as seeing the hi-res pics) there were plenty of suggestions of speakeasy tunnels but then someone unearthed the newspaper accounts of a rather extensive tunnel system built by a millionaire entomologist as a hobby.  This was followed information of the man being a bigamist and his failed attempt to get a real divorce of a fake marriage (complicated as bigamy must often be) and then dying 5 years later.  The situation reminded me Bitner (who was understandably horrified when he happened upon the X-Entertainment post with 1000+ comments about his personal life)..  Only it happened in 1925 instead of 1990.  And still people were able to use the ol internet to get to the sordid little details.